About the blog

This blog is about both scientific, societal/political, and yoga-related issues - individually and considered as different aspects of the same problem/solution. A longer description is found in the first blog entry, and all old posts are found in a structured way here. The blog is an extension of my main home pages yoga-link.se and isbgroup.eu. Twitter: @gunnarcedersund

I have applied to both attend and to present a talk with the title: "Different interpretations of quantum mechanics have different implications for free will"

If I have understood one of my colleagues and co-organisors of this workshop correctly, this is an event that most of the world-elite in this research field attends, so it will be really really exciting (and a little bit scary ;) to see what they will say about what I will present. I myself think that what I have to say is a completely logical conclusion of the current state-of-affairs, but it is still inherently a bit explosive stuff, since it deals with physical laws and free will. But, again if I understand my colleague correctly, this is an event that is attended by everythying from physicists and mathematicians, to philosophers and even historians - and I have good hopes that this at the very least will lead to some quite insightful feedback!

I will be able to explain more in detail what the presentation is about when I have come a little bit further in the explanations here - for now it is enough to say that this registration is a small step for mankind, but that it is a big conceptual step in my own carreer! I am now saying to the world that this is something I am doing as a researcher as well!

Tom Bombadil is one of my favourite characters
in the Tolkien mythology. He is a powerful being who mainly is concerned with
the Nature around him: he can command trees and other things with his voice, he
is married to Goldberry, the Daughter of the River – and not even Sauron’s ring
seemed to have any effect on him. However, at the point of the events in the
Fellowship of the ring, he had restricted his kingdom to lie within certain
boundaries. These are boundaries which he himself has specified, and even
though he seems almost infinitely powerful within these boundaries, he doesn’t
really concern himself with what goes on outside of these boundaries. As we
will see in this blog post, this is very analogous to the discipline of
physics, which also is extremely powerful within its own domain, but which does
not really concern itself with the ongoings outside of these domains.

Tom
Bombadil was unfortunately left out of the movie series by Peter Jackman, so
here is instead an image from the Lord of the rings wiki: a screen shot from lord of the rings online;
added by user Gradivus.

Doesn’t the existence of physical laws lead to
deterministic materialism?

This blog
post is the second in a series of three that is here to lay a first version of
a foundation from which all the other constructions will take off. In the
previous blog post, we made a historical view of how the current situation
appeared, and concluded that the first climax, around 1750-1800, led to the
logical question: “Given the physical laws, and God of the Gaps as an
unnecessary hypothesis - are we not obliged to construct a materialistic and
deterministic worldview?” This question is certainly a valid one, and it needs
to be dealt with properly. There are several reasons why the answer to the
question is no – the physical laws discovered by physics does not necessitate a
materialistic and deterministic worldview – and we will here have a look at two
of these reasons: i) that the current understanding of these laws does not
imply determinism, neither in principle nor in practice, and ii) that physics
operates within certain boundaries that restricts its study object, but that a
worldview should study reality in its entirety.

There is a limit to the predictability: both in
principle and in practice

Let us first take the in principle aspect. This aspect has to do with quantum mechanics,
and means that there is a fundamental limit to how well-determined a prediction
can be, which does not have to do with our computational or measurement
abilities, but with the way the physical universe is structured, according to
our current understanding. As you may be aware of, there are several
interpretations of the equations underlying quantum mechanics, and we will need
to go in to those in more detail in later posts. For now, however, it is enough
to just get a flair of the basic properties of the most well-known
interpretation, which is known as the Copenhagen interpretation. According to
this interpretation, an object – e.g. an electron – is actually not a small
piece of material as we normally think of physical objects (e.g. like a small
little football) but a probability wave. Such a probability wave describes the likelihood that the object is
to be found at different locations, and also the probability that it is to have
any other property of interest, such as energy, momentum, etc. This means that
the particle is not in a single well-determined position, which we can determine
uniquely, but everywhere. In other words, we can only determine its position at
a specific time-point, and after this measurement the position will become
gradually more and more undetermined again – according to the physical laws.
There is also another feature of quantum mechanics that puts a fundamental
limit to how well a system can be determined, and that feature is known as Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle. According to this principle, if you determine one
aspect of an object really really well (e.g. the position), that determination
means that some other aspect of the same object (e.g. the momentum) automatically
becomes more undetermined. The above properties taken together mean that the
assertion made around 1750 – that if you could fully determine a system at one
point in time, you could, at least in principle, calculate all future aspects
of that system – no longer is valid, if one considers the latest understanding
of physics. It was valid a valid argument according to the then prevailing
understanding of physics, Newtonian mechanics, but our scientific understanding
has evolved since then. Note that this is one of the several important things
that has happened in this direction science the early 20th century,
which was mentioned in the previous historical review.

Let
us now move on to the in practice
aspect. The reason why it is important to consider this aspect too is that quantum
effects normally only are considered for really small objects (the largest
object that has displayed quantum effects experimentally to date is a 60-carbon
molecule). When larger objects are considered, quantum mechanics becomes
increasingly more and more equivalent to Newtonian mechanics. Therefore, one
could at this point in the story argue that we still could deterministically
calculate what all future events will be like for all aspects of the world that
we concern ourselves with: the macroscopic events. However, there is then
another aspect that comes into action, and that is the mathematical phenomenon
known as chaos.Image of the Lorenz attractor. It is taken from here (Wikipedia, CC, attribution generic),
but the results can easily be reproduced by anyone knowing how to use e.g. Matlab
or Mathematica.

The feature
of chaos that we need to understand right now is its sensitivity to initial
position uncertainties. The popular science image of this is that the
difference between whether a butterfly flags its wings in Tokyo or not
determines whether or not there a week later will be a tornado in New York. Here
I want to take the chance to refine and improve upon that butterfly image a
bit, since it easily leads to a misunderstanding of what chaos actually means.
To do this, consider the image above, of the Lorenz attractor, which is one of
the most well-studied systems that displays chaos. The image contains two
different simulations, depicted in blue and yellow, and the only difference
between the two simulations is that the place where the simulation starts (at
the cone to the left in each simulation) differs by a small amount. This
difference in where the two simulations starts is much smaller than can be seen
by eye, but after some time in the simulation, the two simulations are clearly
different: they have ended up in different places (the second cone), and, as
can be seen, they have also taken different paths to get there. In other words,
in a chaotic system, even very very small differences in starting positions
will grow over time, and eventually these differences will become so big that
the initial conditions doesn’t matter: one can no longer say where in the
chaotic region the systems started – or, equivalently, no matter how well-determined
the initial conditions are, one can in practice never predict all of the system’s
future. However, with this said, I want to again return to the butterfly
example. As can be seen in the image of the Lorenz attractor, the position becomes
more and more undetermined, and the distance between the two simulated
positions for each given time points grows – but only up to a certain level.
The two simulations are different, but still they lie within the same region in
space. This region is known as the chaotic attractor, and the simulations will
– once they have gotten to this region – never leave it again. In other words,
there is a degree of uncertainty of where the simulation will be (where in the
attractor it will be) but the uncertainty also has a limit (it doesn’t leave
the attractor). For this reason, the butterfly example is perhaps not the best
illustration of a chaotic system: the example relies on the additional
assumption that both the case of a tornado and not a tornado lie within the
same chaotic attractor as the butterfly's flagging of its wings; such a model has, to my knowledge not been constructed.
However, chaos does appear in living systems, which has been demonstrated in
the latest decades by some of my Danish colleagues, both experimentally and
theoretically.

Let us now sum up this first aspect of the
reasons why materialistic determinism not is a necessary consequence of the
physical laws. First, the results within quantum mechanics mean that there is
an upper limit to how well-determined a system can become: there is an inherent
randomness in all processes. Second, no matter how small uncertainties one
starts with, these will – in the chaotic attractors - grow over time, until the
prediction of the system’s future is completely uncertain (up to the level of
the attractor size). In other words, the latest results of physics show that
what previously seemed like a sufficient condition – the existence of physical
laws – no longer implies determinism: neither in principle nor in practice.

The second argument: about boundaries

To
understand this second argument, we need to dive a little bit more into how
science actually operates. First we will explore the concept of postulates, and
the boundaries that they imply. Then we will shortly examine some examples of
what may lie outside the current boundaries, which will lead us to the left and
right hand sides in Wilber’s four quadrants. We will then return to the
postulates, and see how science moves from them to physical laws, to
predictions and rejections, and we will thereby again arrive at the key insight
that “science does not prove things, but all theories are not equal”.

A set of
postulates is a relatively small set of initial assumptions that a whole theory
is based upon. They could therefore be thought of as axioms, in a mathematical
framework, but postulates also deal with the relationship between the theory
and world. In physics, such postulates have been laid down at various
occasions, and even though that process is not complete, the postulates
typically contains some initial postulated equations, and statements of the
character: the developed theory should be able to explain phenomena that are
reproducible, measurable, interdependent
of the observer, etc. These postulates are then what one uses to derive and
develop all the remaining results, in a process that involves predictions and
experimental tests that will be explained below.

The postulates thus specify the initial
assumptions, and this also includes what
will be studied. In other words, when the physical postulates say that they
should study “measurable, reproducible, observer-independent things”, this is
just like if one would say that “this attempt at a complete theory for biology should
be able to describe all living objects”. This does not mean that there is not
such a thing as non-living objects, and it certainly does not mean that the
success of the theory proves that there isn’t such a thing as non-living
objects. It merely says that non-living objects are – if they exists – not
studied or covered within this theory of biology. In just the same way the
postulates of physics does not say that there isn’t such a thing as
non-measurable, non-reproducible or non-observer-dependent phenomena, and the
success of physics does not prove that there are no such phenomena. The postulates
merely says that if such phenomena does exist, they are not studied or
described within the realms of physics – at least not by a theory of physics
that is based upon those postulates.

Depiction of the 4
quadrants by Wilber, with a focus on the difference between the left and right
hand sides

Let
us now consider some phenomena that would lie outside of the above mentioned realms
of physics, but that still are worthy of studying, and that certainly should be
included in a worldview. To do this, let us consider the above depicted four
quadrants of Wilber, and especially its right and left-hand sides. The
right-hand side of these quadrants are concerned with physical objects, and
physical phenomena, i.e. with physics or things that could be considered as
physics. The left-hand side, on the other hand, is concerned with the inner
subjective thought-experiences of our lives. Often these two sides are just
that: two sides or aspects of a single phenomenon. Consider for instance such a
mundane thing as observing an apple. This could be viewed from a physical
perspective. The apple in itself could be measured with respect to its weight,
color, etc. Also the process of observing could be viewed from a physical
perspective: one could measure the brain activity in the person who is
observing the apple. However, the inner experience of the person who is
observing the apple is not captured, even by such brain activity measurements.
In other words, in the brain scanner one sees the physical representation of
which areas in the brain that is active: but one does not see an apple in the
same way as the person who is observing the able is seeing it. This subjective
experience of the person is something that belongs to the left-hand side of
this phenomenon, and the brain-activity as measured using some technical devise
belongs to the right-hand side of this same phenomenon. This means that the
left-hand side aspect of this experience – or of any studied phenomenon for
that matter – does not fall within the current realms of physics: it is data of
a fundamentally different character.

The two phases of the experiment-analysis
cycle: one of my standard slides when giving scientific lectures.

We are now
ready for the last part in understanding this second argument: the boundary
argument. I already said that the postulates contains some initial equations
and assumptions about the object they are to describe. Just as with
mathematical axioms, these initial statements can then be used to derive a
large number of theorems, which are more complex statements that come as
logical consequences of the initial postulates. In these theorems, which may be
laws of physics, there will often be some unknown constants. To determine these
constants, you need experimental data. We have now introduced the first two
objects in the figure above: the experimental data, and the mechanistic explanations
to these data (which e.g. may be a set of physical laws). In the first phase,
Phase I, one uses the data to determine the values of the unknown constants (if
there are any), and then sees whether the suggested laws can describe the
experimental data. If the theoretical simulations and the experimental data are
sufficiently close to each other, the model is kept, and moves on to Phase II,
and if the agreement between simulations and data is too bad, the suggested
theory is rejected. For the non-rejected statements, one looks for predictions,
that may be tested in new experiments. In this way, Phase I may lead to the
necessity of new theories, and Phase II leads to new experiments, and the above
process is thus a cycle that goes on and on. The reason for this lies at the
heart of what I am trying to convey here: science does not prove things, but all
theories are not equally realistic. In other
words, what one can say with a high certainty is that a theory has been
rejected, but one can not say that a theory has been proven to be true; there may
always come a new prediction that is wrong when tested experimentally. However,
just because all predictions and affirmative statements in science are
non-proven theories, this does not mean that all predictions and theories are
equal: some of them may have been rejected, because there were experimental
data that they couldn’t describe.

Summing up – and what about the second climax?

With these
insights at place, we are now ready to sum up, and to put all of this together.
First, we have seen that the updated view of what physics actually says implies
that the laws of physics does not necessitate determinism. Second, the other
side of the coin, materialism, also does not follow as a logical and necessary
conclusion from the existence of physical laws, and the reason for that is the
second argument: the boundary arguments. Just because physics has defined
itself as the study of measurable, reproducible, things, this does not mean
that other things does not exist, it only means that e.g. non-measurable things
– e.g. inner experiences and thoughts as
seen by the observer – not are a part of physics. Third, such subjective experiences
are, nevertheless, an important part of our lives: in fact, they are the only things
that we as humans experience. Therefore, such subjective experiences – our inner
universe – must certainly be dealt with by any complete description of how our
world functions. A worldview must therefore, by necessity, be such a complete
description, which takes all aspects of our lives into account. In
fact, we do not have a choice: we are all of us making decisions about how
science and physics relate to our own personal experiences, and materialism is only
one of the choices that is compatible with science. Fourth, as I will argue in more
detail in future posts, it would actually be possible to expand the sound
principles of science to include data also from the left-hand side in Wilber’s
four quadrants. Such a science is what Wilber calls broad science. Since such
broad science would explain more data than traditional science, which Wilber
calls narrow science, it would be a superior theory. Therefore, although we
still haven’t seen any details of how broad science, or a more complete
worldview would look, we have now concluded that looking for one would be a
meaningful endeavor, and that it seems like the updated logical conclusion of
looking at the science/worldview relation no longer reads “the necessity of
materialistic determinism”, but “narrow science trumps narrow religion (religion
that e.g. like in some of the fights on evolution stands in opposition to
science), but broad science would trump narrow science – because it would be
able to explain more data”

Further reading – and the scientific accuracy/controversy
of these statements

Just as in
the first blog post, I will try to end all sub-sequent posts by links to more
detailed reading, and with some comments of the scientific accuracy in what I
say – including some estimate of the level of controversiality in my
statements. First, regarding more reading, almost all of the statements in this
blog post have been made before, e.g. in the essay that I pointed to
earlier (which is written in a more formal manner, with much more links to
literature), in the book by Ian G. Barbour, and – where already indicated –
in some texts by Wilber. Second, regarding the first argument, which builds on
the understandings within quantum mechanics and chaos theory, I have myself
studied both these theories at a high level – basically to the point of doing
research myself therein – and I do not believe that there are any controversial
statements regarding what the actual physics says. Nevertheless, there may
exist physicists who disagree with me regarding my claims that those results
means that determinism no longer is a necessary conclusion, and I will myself refine this statement in future posts, when we come into discussions on free will. Similarly,
regarding the basic description of how science works, they describe a
relatively standard view of science that goes back to people like Popper.
Again, however, this does not mean that all scientists would agree with me
regarding the importance and soundness of attempting to include data from the
left-hand side in Wilber’s quadrants. But if all people already agreed with
everything I had to say here, this would be a pretty meaningless endeavor.

I should say that this version is not the same as the one that was originally uploaded on youtube. It is the same material, but with a new voice-over.

I could also add that I am really looking forward to having more of these videos out. There are so many good things to say, which I now cannot really say yet, because they will either sound really new agey and fluffy, or perhaps will not even be understandable - but that once more of these videos are out, will be easy to say in a meaningful fashion.

But...as always: the journey is where the pleasure is! So let us enjoy this journey together. Next blog post and video in this series will be about whether it at all is possible/meaningful/sound to do such a project as this one. A big topic!

Finally, tomorrow I am going to Uruguay, where I will stay for about a week!

So...let’s
now embark on this journey - towards an integral worldview!

And, I
think the best way to start is, as in so many other cases, by first looking a
little bit back. Let’s do like in the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge, in the
fairy tale by Charles Dickens: let’s listen to the Ghost of Christmases Past,
and understand how we actually got to the situation where we are now.

Illustration by John Leech, from the original publishing of the book.
For another blog post on this story, go here.

From complete integration to full-blown
materialism – the first climax

Let us
first recall that this current sub-division we have between the various parts
of our knowledge-system, and between these parts and the entire worldview, has
not always been the case. On the contrary, in the old Antique developments,
there was basically only one scientific discipline – called philosophy – and it
included all relevant aspects that we consider here, both regarding the outer
and the inner worlds. All of these aspects were viewed as things that naturally
goes together, and that cannot be understood in a good way if considered
separately.

Let us then
go to the early 16th century, and to the birth of modern science. At
this point, the church had complete control of all allowed truths, both
regarding spiritual things, and regarding worldly matters, and these two sides
weren’t really distinguished. Part of this prevailing worldview was
that the Earth was in the middle of the Universe, a fact that was based on some
related statements in the Bible, which then was the ultimate source of
knowledge. Into this picture enters now some scientists: Copernicus, Kepler,
Galilei, Newton, etc. Of perhaps most interest right now is Galileo Galilei,
since it was he that laid down many of the principles behind modern science. With
quite some justification, he is often referred to as the father of modern
science. Perhaps most importantly, what he introduced was the principle of
experimental tests. The type of things he said was of the following character:
“I have another idea of how the world works: that the Sun is in the middle. I
think that we should find out who is right, by experimentally testing which of
our two theories gives the best predictions. Let’s ask the Book of Nature, not
the Book of the Bible” Noteworthy here is that, although he was widely
condemned and punished by the church for his writings, he was – in fact – a quite
religious man. He also had a relatively sound view of how to combine the two
aspects of his belief: for matters regarding how the world works, go to the
Book of Nature, and for matters that has to do with the upliftenment of the
human spirits, go to the Bible. The two books come from the same
author, so they cannot be in true conflict, he believed.

This
religiousness, and this complete and non-problematic integration of the
religious beliefs with his natural science investigations, also held for Isaac
Newton. What is characteristic with him, is that he introduced physical laws,
laws that are universal and works in the same way for small objects in everyday
life as they do for the heavenly bodies in the sky. He could use these very
simple laws to derive the old predictions of the previous scientists, and could
thereby predict the stellar movements in a quite detailed fashion. There were, however,
some things he could not explain, and these observed abnormalitiesand deviations he simply said were evidence of God’s intervention. Newton’s laws
were then prevailing for several centuries, and the predictive power and the
universality of these laws were starting to impress more and more people. So,
when Laplace in the 18th century were able to find natural
explanations for one after the other of the previously identified abnormalities
– which had been used as evidences for the interventions and existence of God –
this
then logically led to the interesting question of whether there at all was a
God? Was God just an unnecessary hypothesis, one that science could do equally
well without.The idea of the completely deterministic and
law-abiding universe was a fact, and was a theory that, once formulated,
started to get a stronger and stronger foothold within peoples’ consciousness.

Galileo Galilei, the Father of Modern Science, who introduced many of the most important scientific principles that we go by also today. Picture from Wikipedia.

A temporary return to spirituality before the
next big debate starts

After this
peak during the enlightenment came the Romantic age. During this era, the
spiritual side got a little re-boost, and people were starting to revere Nature,
which often was referred to with a capital N. If the Book of Nature is the best
and most reliable source of knowledge, let us revere it. At this point, it was
still typically believed that even though physical laws existed, the human mind
and its free will was not under their influence. Similarly, Man was with his
mental capacities higher than the beasts, and that was the way God – who now
was thought of often as the clock-maker, who at the beginning of time had set
everything in motion – had intended it. In other words, religion had been
forced to a big retreat, but a new balance had been restored.

With this
in mind, it is not so strange that the theories of Darwin still were perceived
as such a serious threat. If Man was not special, and if Nature hadn’t been
designed by a God – if God also in biology turned out to be an unnecessary
hypotheses – then the newly found balance was lost, and they would be forced to
new retreats. Therefore, huge fights broke out, partially within the religious
and academic societies, but most importantly between them. And, as always in fights, the other side is painted in the bleakest possible colors. In bitter
fights, you define yourself not only in positive terms, but in negative terms.
“I am nothing like them”. I think that this is one of the reasons for the,
since then, quite hostile attitude that exists within science towards anything
that could be viewed as non-physical or spiritual. Those are things that have
to do with religion, and we – scientists – are nothing like those idiots. It would therefore be interesting to know if things would have played out differently if religion already from the onset had taken the viewpoint that already Galilei had: to embrace new scientific results as steps forward in the overall search for Truth. Perhaps then the divide might not be so big today, and perhaps then science would still deal with the big overall challenge of producing worldviews?

Illustration in the New York Times of the so-called Monkey trial, July 12, 1925.

The counter-acting trends: the system and
integration trends

At this
point in history, in the early 1900s, we are more or less at the point of
division that has remained ever since. The Darwin debate is often said to have
had its climax around 1925, with the so-called Monkey trial. In Europe,
this trial was followed with some irony and distance, almost as if it was the
final remains of a debate that was more or less over already, whereas in the U.S.
the following was much more fierce. Amazingly, this debate is still ongoing in
the U.S., e.g. regarding what must, can, and cannot be taught in school regarding
evolution. The key thing is that religious people want evolution to be
explained as just another theory. I hope that I through these texts can pervey
to those for whom it is not clear already that all scientific claims are just
theories, but that that does not mean that all theories are equally credible.

However,
let us finally examine shortly some of the parallel trends that have occurred during
the previous century within the science/spirituality interface, which also are
what leads up to the worldview that will be outlined here. As explained already
in the first video, much of these developments have to do with the developments
within theoretical physics, i.e. within quantum mechanics and relativity
theory. These theories lead to insights that are so far away from everyday experiences
that they invariably leads to questions of a philosophical/worldview nature.

Also, some
of these results are a reversal of the reductionism-trend that had been going
on for the last 4 centuries. As described above, the first such separation was that of physics and
astronomy from philosphy/religion, and this continued with the splitting off of chemistry,
biology, biochemistry, etc, i.e. to create ever smaller and ever more
specialized fields. Similarly, this reductionism also implied the belief that
it was enough to understand each component, the smallest components, in
isolation, and that once that was done, the rest was just logical consequences;
no higher orders of organization exists as independent units of their own. This
started to be challenged within quantum mechanics. In this, it was realized
that really small particles behave in a quite different way from our normal big
particles: they can be viewed as non-local, i.e. as existing virtually everywhere, but with different probabilities. Similarly,
if these particles come together, e.g. as a proton and an electron does in a hydrogen
atom, the connected atom is not just the sum of the two individual components,
but something different (technically, because a coupling term appears). This and
other similar results within theoretical physics can be seen as the start of
the systems trend, saying that reductionism has a limit. This insight has then
been followed in many other fields as well. One of these is systems biology,
which is the field within which I am active, and which takes the view that a
cell can not be understood by studying its constituent proteins isolated from
the cell one-by-one, but that these proteins must be studied in their living
context. But there are also other examples, including sociology, cultural
history, systems theory, etc. Finally, these developments have also been paralleled
in worldview developments. Already in the early developments, several of the
foreground figures had quite philosophical, sometimes even spiritual,
interpretations of the results. And this
has then been further developed in other fields, which for instance include
systems theology, which basically is a way to interpret Christianity which embraces
and fully incorporates the latest results within modern science. But a
more detailed discussion of these things will have to wait for future posts.

Essay and further reading

As I said
already in the first blog post, it is my clear intent to try to merge this worldview development with
mainstream science as much as possible, and to thereby create an almost
continuous bridge from the really popular science summary view in the youtube
videos, to these slightly more detailed blog posts, via more extensive text
books, all the way in to ordinary scientific publications. Associated to this
blog post, I therefore want to point to an essay that I wrote about 8-9 years
ago, which deals with almost the exact same topic. In this, you will have a
slightly more extensive description of the above historical processes, which
also contains references to text books, papers, and other material for even further
reading. This essay has not been published in a scientific journal, but it was approved as an essay in a course I took within the university. Finally, this
essay also deals with much of the material that will be posted in the last two
posts in this preparatory series: “Is this really a possible goal?”, and “Can
one define God in a strict yet useful manner?”. After that foundation is laid, we will go in to a
new series of 8-10 blogs with some really cool stuff!

I therefore end this blog post in the same way as I begin the above essay: with a quote from Einstein.

What is our lives' meaning, what meaning is there at all for livingcreatures? To be able to give an answer to these questions is to bereligious. You ask: Is there then any point in asking that question?I answer: A person that does not consider his own, and his fellowhuman being's life as meaningful, is not only unhappy, he is hardlyalive.

towards an integral worldviewPosted by yoga-link.se Mar 04, 2013 04:44Sooo...now I have as well created a video that summarizes in a simplified but also slightly different way what I said earlier today in the first blog post about my newest, and perhaps coolest, project as of yet: to outline my integral worldview, integrating a my scientific understandings with my yoga-insights. The video is available here and at the below embedded video.

This is a
picture of one of my closest friends, Oskar Ganestål. He left his body
yesterday evening, at the age of 46 (here is a facebook summary of our relationship). When sitting thinking about his life, and about
what he probably is most proud of in terms of what he leaves behind, I realized
that we only do some quite limited number of really important contributions in
our lives. This made me realize that it is time at last to stop waiting, and that
it at last is time to start on a project that I have prepared for for almost 25
years, both through my scientific and through my yoga careers.I will now,
today, at last embark on the project that I think will be one of the most important
things that I will do in my life. There is a time and a place for everything, and
now it is time at last for this. Thank you Oskar for this inspiration! I look
forward to many more inspirations to come as we move along in our ongoing
dialogues and creations, in this new phase of our relationship.

-------------------------

In my life,
I have done many things, but I have only had a few long-term dreams and goals.
In other words, many of the things I have done, even things that have lasted
for several years, have typically just been partial sub-goals to one of these few overall
ambitions. Today I have decided that the time has come at last to start to manifest
one of these overall goals:to develop and describe, in detail, a leading-edge
worldview that combines the state-of-the-art understanding within science with
the deepest and most profound understandings within yoga, in a way that helps
us evolve as persons and as a society. Now, as an introduction to this effort,
I will just start with a blog post explaining why I think that this is so
important, how I have prepared for this, and a little bit more details of what
this actually will entail.

Picture from my first blog post, where I outlined the vision for this blog: to help stimulate the development of our societal triad: science, worldview and society.

Why is this so important?

So, what I
want to do is to outline a worldview – how can that be important!? Well, to
start with, our worldviews are important, because they are, almost by
definition, the underlying processes that guides and determines all things that
we do. In other words, if you want to change what you do in a certain situation
– change how you think about that situation. And in the same way, if you want
to help stimulate the evolution of a society, help stimulate the evolution of
its worldview.

At this
point, I also want to add that the particular worldview that I will develop is
something that will integrate many things that currently are opposing each
other. For instance, many of the troubles that we have in our society are due
to religion, and this in itself is due to the fact that people within different
faiths do not have the tools and concepts to understand and relate to each
other in a compassionate fashion. In particular people with a materialistic
worldview have a hard time understanding people who don’t, and especially for
this latter situation, I think that I will bring some pieces to the table that
will be helpful to some. Regarding this, I also have the feeling that many
people somehow are trapped in a feeling that it is scientifically proven that
materialism is the only available worldview, and who therefore are afraid of,
or perhaps even attacking, their own or other peoples’ spiritual urges. This
also leads to corresponding conflicts within different factions and goals
within our society. I hope that some of the things I will outline here will
bring peace to some of these conflicts, both within and between people.
Ultimately, I think and hope that such a peace will help us to bring a more
sensible agenda to our society – where goals having to do with economic growth
will be considered secondary, and where things having to do with our psychological
and spiritual growths will be considered primary. Such a change can only happen
if we publically stop thinking that these latter goals are meaningless
mumbo-jumbo, and that stopping can – I think – only happen if we make peace
between science and spirituality. For all these reasons, I think that it is
utterly important that we develop a worldview that encompasses science and
spirituality in a harmoniously co-existing and co-evolving whole.

At home in the universe, a book by Stuart Kauffman, made me realize that I needed to explore the emerging field of systems biology, apart from theoretical physics, to produce a really credible and leading-edge worldview. Picture from Amazon.

How have I prepared for this, and how does this
relate to other efforts?

As I mentioned
above, this thing I am about to embark on now is one of the few long-term goals
I have had in my life, and I have in a way prepared for it since I was 10 years
old, when I first started to explore yoga (via a book that my father brought
home by chance). That book led me to start a yoga practice, and it also led me to explore eastern philosophies, and to create the
first bases for my current worldview. For some time, this eastern-inspired worldview
co-existed with the purely materialistic worldview that I had gotten “by
osmosis” from my surroundings, and during this time I tried to explain all
things that happened to me in both worldviews. However, after a while, I
realized that explanations became so much more awkward and extreme/unrealistic
in the purely materialistic worldview that I gradually dropped this habit. This
dropping was also caused by the fact that I after a while started to realize
that the purely materialistic worldview is not the only one consistent with a
state-of-the-art scientific understanding, but that there are many options of
how to expand the partial insights and hardcore pieces to the puzzle that are
produced within science into a complete worldview – and that several such
worldviews can be constructed that are more or less identical with the one I
had. (here, however, I must stress that there also are many worldviews and
statements that are inconsistent with a scientific state-of-the-art
understanding) I also realized that physics was at the heart of this, since therein
our scientific understanding of the world has reached its highest level, and since
it is from physics that many of the strangest and – for me – most important
pieces to the puzzle originates. Therefore, I realized that I needed to study
physics, to be able to understand these pieces fully, and to be able to explain these
things – these different possible interpretations of the state-of-the-art
understandings within physics – in a way
that went beyond typical new age mumblings to statements made with the authority
of somebody who has actually understood these things. Understood these things
as good as anybody has understood them. Therefore, I took a master in theoretical
physics, and now – in the last years – I have actually also started to go back
to the research frontier within theoretical physics (more on this later).
However, apart from this research in physics, I also realized that I needed to
dive into a corresponding state-of-the-art understanding of systems theory, and
its applications to biology: biology in general, but ultimately also to
psychology. This latter task, systems biology, I have spent the last 10 years
of my life to, and now I have also launched a Ph.D. student who is
doing systems biology of human psychology. I have also realized that I have
needed to first establish myself as a scientist, before I can start to embark
on these more fringe and in some peoples’ eyes suspicious activities. Nevertheless,
since all of these things now are starting to come together, I at last feel
that I am ready to start writing putting all of them together, in a public
place. The final push was, as I wrote above, the death of my friend yesterday.

Finally,
some short comparisons of how the way I have tried to prepare myself goes
beyond what other people have done before. First, there are quite a few medial
people, who in various ways have reached a self-proclaimed level of
enlightenment, and then simply explained how the world works. I am now thinking
of people like Hicks/Abraham, Neale Donald Walsh, Martinus, Rudolph Steiner, Anandamurti, etc. Many of these people claim their frameworks as scientific, but
neither of them they have used the scientific method, linked their insights
with established scientific theories, or published their results in scientific
journals. There are, however, another group of people who have gone much
further in this scientific direction. The most important of these is, in my
opinion, Ken Wilber, who have produced a rather comprehensive theoretical
framework, and who also links a profound understanding of meditation and
associated insights with a profound and up-to-date understanding of many of the
branches within science. However, Wilber is not a scientist himself, and does
not publish in scientific literature. He can therefore be
ignored by the scientific community. Finally, there are of course a few
scientists within science who also take a bigger perspective. Unfortunately,
very few of those are active within the field of philosophy, which for some
reason has abdicated from its search for the bigger over-arching quests and now
only deals with nit-picky details (please enlighten me if you are aware of
interesting exceptions!). There are, on the other hand a few theoreticians that
are worth mentioning, e.g. physicists and mathematicians Roger Penrose, Stuart
Kauffman, Norbert Wiener, etc. However, none of these have created frameworks
that are particularly similar to what I intend to outline here, and this is
because they typically are more less ignorant of psychological phenomena,
meditation, and related issues.

Ken Wilber, one of the most important pre-cursors to what I will develop, since he is one of the few who both has a well-developed understanding for meditation and science, and since he is seeking to create, and argue for the importance of, a worldview that incorporates both these two things. Here he shows how one could do research on people that are advanced in meditation - a thing that I am very much planning for myself. I just need to train sufficiently many advanced students first!

So, what is it that I will do?

After this
little introduction, I will now start to post various blog posts that will
contain pieces to a puzzle that will become a more-or-less complete worldview.
This will not be a final and non-evolving worldview, since that is not a feature of a
scientific worldview. It will, however, be leading-edge (meaning that
several of the things will not have been said before, elsewhere, and that several
things will contain very recent understandings). Most importantly, the
worldview here is being constructed to be internally consistent, and to cover
the integration between all the main areas of life, which most notably includes
both the inner and the outer worlds. Some of things I will say will be ordinary
mainstream scientific results, and some will be outside. Some of the things
that I describe here will be standard spiritual knowledge, some will be less
widely known – and the latter certainly concerns ways to link these spiritual
statements with a scientific framework. I will try to clearly specify what is
what, and also to try to explain how the things that are not yet mainstream
science, still does not imply a violation of the things that actually are said
within science – how also these things lie within the allowed range of
science-consistent worldviews.

Now in
these early posts I will start by covering really basic things, but which will
be necessary for all future developments. I will, e.g., deal with the question
of how a combination of science and spirituality such as the one I propose here even can exist in principle, what a meaningful definition of the word God could be
(and how the proposed definition still can be useful when reading spiritual
texts). With these things in place, I will then use some 8-10 posts to
step-by-step outline a mechanistic interpretation of the widely hyped principle
called “the law of attraction”. This outlining will include several other
important building-blocks, such as the relation between free will and physical
laws, how the word vibration can be interpreted in a meaningful way, how
thoughts relate to objects, how thoughts relate to each other, etc. With these
things in place, there are many ways to move ahead, and this is decided a
little bit less in detail.

Apart from
these blog posts, I will probably also post short summaries as youtube-videos,
and also collect all of these things in a more connected and detailed
description in a book. The things that are possible to publish in scientific
journals will of course also be published there. As time evolves, some of those
publications will for sure also involve scientific studies on the effects of - and
the mechanisms exploited by - yoga and meditation!

About me

I am a yoga-teacher in the tantric tradition, but also a scientist, and an engaged citizen. Politically, I am engaged in e.g. democracy, internet freedom, human rights, alternative economic theories, and environmental issues. Scientifically, I am working with systems biology, and the study of complex systems on all levels (isbgroup.eu). Yoga-wise, I am teaching and interested in classical yoga, where you take a holistic view, and merge not only physical exercises with breathing exercises and meditation, but also those things with karma yoga (harmonious working), dancing, music, sex, and all the rest of it. See http://yoga-link.se Twitter: @gunnarcedersund